A Blooming Hill Vineyard

A Blooming Hill Vineyard & Winery

5195 SW Hergert Rd., Cornelius OR         503-992-1196

It’s Memorial Day in Oregon Wine Country and all of our new 2009 Whites are available.  They are wonderful.  Come and see us – directions on the bar at the left – we’ll be serving all of our wines, our wedding chocolate cake and the wine dogs will be here to escort you! (Gemini can read, by the way….we’ll show you.)  Our $5 tasting fee is applied to your puchases.  Here’s what you can expect this weekend:

2009 Riesling is a light, semi-sweet wine with fruit filled taste; best served with desserts or light hundeons or by itself for those with a sweet-tooth! $15 

2009 Pinot Gris – a mild, fruity wine featuing tastes of pear, melon and peach.  Serve this wine with salads, fish, chicken or serve with hors d’oeuvres.  $10

2009 Chardonnay has a clean, creisp, furity taste with a smooth finish complementing spicy food and a good companion for fish, chicken and many pork dishes.  $12

2008 Mingle – a blend of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Riesling with complex flavors resulting in a crisp and refreshing wine with tropical fruit flavors.  Mingle loves food! $12 Bronze medal winner 2010 NW Wine Summit

2008 Oregon Wine Awards Outstanding Pinot Noir and Silver Medal winner 2010 NW Wine Summit - a superbly fruit foward flavor and gorgeous garnet color, a smooth sensation and a long finish!  Serve with all foods.  $20

Order directly from us if you can’t make it out this weekend.

www.abloominghillvineyard.com

Sending Out Good Thoughts For A Sunny Weekend

If you have been following the story of Wilbur, our pigeon - here or on Facebook - you saw a reference to a bird I once got drunk on brandy.  A few people wanted the back story so here it is.

A thousand years ago when I was living in Snedens Landing on the Hudnson River and Charlie was four, we were all sitting out in the lovely backyard when a bird flung itself into the glass patio doors.  It was a little bird.  It made a loud smack and then fell to the ground.  I ran over and there was the poor little thing lying there looking done for.  Something made me touch its little soft body and I felt heart beats.  “It’s alive!” was my happy cry, “What should I do?”  I was not then, nor am I particularly now, the outdoors type so birds were either in the zoo, in a cage in my apartment or pigeons walking around the streets of New York dining on discarded prezel pieces and hot dog buns they retrieved from sidewalks.   I once took one I found bleeding on a heating grate to the vet, wrapped up in my cape, but what to do about ones in the wild was not in my skill set.  Not that we lived in the wild; Snedens is a quite sophisticated place only 20 miles from NYC.

Don, my husband then and Charlie’s father, suggested a good idea would be to wring the poor thing’s neck and put it out of its misery.  That was out of the question.  I love birds.  My first pet was a parakeet named Tweetie who could speak (really), ate corners off my homework and fished out the guppies in the fish tank until we discovered that and protected them.   Years later I had a parakeet in an apartment I lived in on West 75th Street who flew out of the window.  It was the former parlor of the brownstone on the second floor in the front.  I was heartbroken.  A week later, I heard a bird chirping in my neighbor’s apartment in the back.  I knocked.  They had found a bird flying in the hallways, captured it in a sheet and taken it in.  It was my bird!  Reunited, I bought two more.  The three parakeets would fly around the small apartment.  When my soon to be mother-in-law would visit, the birds would rest on her head.  She was a small woman – not five feet tall – with sparse, gray hair.  They must have thought it was nesting material.  She was always a good sport about it.

So you can see why ending the little thing’s life was not even a consideration.  Then I had the idea to try and revive it with brandy so I got the brandy and an eyedropper.  Charlie was fascinated and very much involved in the dispensing of the brandy into the bird’s beak.  How much to give it?  Didn’t even try to figure it out. I just dropped a few drops in and watched.  Sure enough, the bird perked up.   Then he stood up and staggered a few steps.  Then he plopped down.  Then I gave him some more brandy.  Same routine.  Finally, he attempted to fly and executed a short if whirlpool flight – a little like Wilbur’s early short hops as his feathers were growing back.  The next time he tried to fly he made it to the low branch of a tree and swayed back and forth, mercifully anchored as birds are by their toes.   Honestly, the other birds in the vicinity all flew over and it looked for all the world as if our bird was telling his story.  Maybe recommending the brandy.  Who knows.  Brandy, wine – it’s all good.  Maybe we should give Wilbur a little send-off Pinot Noir when we release him.

In the 2010 Oregon Wine Awards competition for his 2008 Pinot Noir.  The results were announced today.  I knew the results would go online today, May 1, and I could hardly wait to get to my Blackberry this morning … this is Jim’s first professionally produced wine for the commercial market and the first wine we have entered anywhere so we really didn’t expect any recognition.  Needless to say, we are pretty excited!  We’re pouring today and I’ve made a big sign for the tasting room to announce this.

Thank you to everyone who has already tasted this wine.  We didn’t make this in great quantity – one of the reasons it is so good is that it is artisinal and limited – so now we’ll have to make sure we put away just a little to savor in the future before we sell it out!

Yippee!